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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

>Students who now go to schools who do nothing for them and have no chance of paying their loans -- or spend most of their adult life trying to -- would be dissuaded from making that incorrect financial choice.

The feedback loop for that is incredibly slow and incomplete. University reputations move on the order of decades, and only a handful of universities enter the public consciousness by way of reputation. Most students also don't have the freedom of choice to go to any university of their choosing (or everyone would go to the 'best' one). 'invisible hand' arguments just don't work on this one.

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I'm baffled by adults that grew up with computers yet seem to be unable to google a school for their reputation and the job prospects for graduates.

Back in my day, pre-internet, every high school guidance counselor had catalogs that compared schools, so did public libraries, and magazines like US News & World Report would annually publish rankings.

US News still publishes rankings, that's why every college has three Vice-Chancellors of Gaming the US News Rankings.

(See Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction", where she blames US News rankings specifically for the bloat of universities and the overuse of adjuncts.)

Gaming a magazine is one thing, but I'm not sure how schools are able to game google to hide "graduating" masses of unhappy, unqualified, and unemployable students.

I'm not sure people ARE ignorant of that. When I was in school people would make jokes about what they'd do after college "I'm an English major, so probably wait tables. Ha ha ha!" And I always wanted to say "That's literally true."

My perception is that people, especially at that age, feel pressure to follow a track, and going to college is expected, and some majors are easy, and so they follow the path of least resistance.

I love going off a tangent so here's so wthing previously on hn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777899

When there's disconnect between the happytalk of the university and the employability/performance of students the students will blame themselves for not working hard enough. They will not blame the university for having an outdated curriculum or incompetent faculty.

My institution offers a seven-year combined BS/MD program. Graduate on time, get an MCAT score above the national mean and a decent GPA, and after 3 years you are automatically admitted to the institution's medical school. One requirement for admission into this program is an ACT score >= 32. Of this cohort, only 60 % made the cut.

60 % is low. This can't all be students that transferred out because the undergrad instruction is too awful or are otherwise incapable. I would put the blame squarely on the irrelevant curriculum and also would not hire anyone from that place because the level of instruction is just too low.

Traditionally, a university's function was to educate students, not to make them employable. I spent years in graduate school learning the obscure details of my discipline, but I didn't take classes on how to get 22 year olds jobs.

Automatic medical school admission? Can you tell me what this institution is or where I could find a list of universities with similar programs?

You just ask Google for things like "seven-year bs/md program" or "seven-year program". It's interesting to see that Google's autocomplete offers up suggestions like "seven-year program ranking". It makes sense, they are becoming popular.

Feedback loops for "Is this degree a good investment?" are slow because it can take 15 years or more between starting an undergraduate degree to reaching maximum salary (and/or fully paying off loans).

So you can only really report on how good value a course was 15 years ago - and in the intervening period, there's a good chance the academics, curriculum, price, industry and economy will have changed a great deal.

But if student loans existed in a competitive market, there would exist huge incentive for loan providers to do everything they could to really figure these things out. I completely take your point that this feedback would never be exact, but with federal student loans, the current feedback is about as worse as it could be. In a true market system, loan providers -- who would care a lot about being paid back! -- would require higher rates for schools with more dubious success, and would therefore tighten the feedback loop between school quality and student enrollment.

Right, but in a market, if loans allowed to fluctuate with propensity of it being paid off, the student who'd be about to enroll in a good-for-nothing school would be facing far, far higher rates... which would tighten that feedback loop.

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